Welcome to the Secular Theocracy

Jeffrey Lord’s post at The American Spectator about the “Theocratic” bent of “The Left’s” obsession with bans on things that are bad for us or are bad for the environment ends with a great flourish. Lord’s analogy is to the theocracies of old that banned things like subversive books for theological reasons. But since liberals ban things, they must be like the theocrats, too:

The very people who shriek the loudest about the danger of an American theocracy based on religion — something that has never happened under the Constitution, nor can it — are well on their way to creating the secular version of just that.

Lord’s case: liberals want to ban sugary drinks, fracking, excessive use of salt in pre-prepared foods and restaurant fare, plastic bags, and the Bible. What’s weird about the case is that the reasons liberals use to ban these things are reasons that all in the debates can understand as reasons: public health and the shared costs of obesity, environmental health and clean water, more public health, plastic waste and environmental destruction with plastic bags, and separation of church and state. Those are all bans that benefit all by protecting us from consequences. Banning books doesn’t do that. That’s why we use ‘theocracy’ as a bad word for a government.

So Lord’s analogy is silly to begin with. But to call a secular order committed to public reasons a ‘theocracy’ is simply a manifest contradiction.